


Phantoms to Replace the World I Had

by citron_presse



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 19:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citron_presse/pseuds/citron_presse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i><b>Better you die than I</b>, she was accustomed to say.  Whatever else happened, whatever else she might have wanted (sometimes), survival was her imperative.</i>
</p><p>A coda to episode 2.09 <i>Katerina</i>, with references to episode 2.06 <i>Plan B</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phantoms to Replace the World I Had

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waltzmatildah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/gifts).



> Written for the prompt at the [Katherine Pierce Ficathon](http://lisal825.livejournal.com/50738.html), _I let a little love slip from my lips . . ._. The prompt, title and cut text are from _Coming Down_ by Ball Park Music.

 

 

 

Shut inside the tomb, she has a recurring dream. She might call it a nightmare, but when you’re one of the scariest nightmares around, albeit temporarily indisposed, that occurs as quite silly. Anyway, the diminution is comforting when she wakes up clutching her throat.

Just a dream.

She’s running. A landscape of bleak snow, dark, the black leafless skeletons of trees, air suspended, only four sounds in the world: her breath; her footsteps crunching; panting, gaining on her; and, once, resounding, the plaintive howl of a wolf.

A cloud slides back and the scene is washed in silver, beguiling, ghostly, and she stops and looks behind her. Knows, suddenly, that she can’t run any longer.

Not because she’s tired. She has nowhere else to go.

He erupts from the moonlight, silver light discharging silver fur, thick, soft, suffocating; breath, saliva hot and wet against her neck, growling against her ear, his teeth savaging her skin, ripping into her larynx, jagged, wild and snarling.

And it’s over. Nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

Because a werewolf bite can kill a vampire.

Customarily, not so quickly, though. His dream-form shows her more mercy than anyone showed him.

 

 

 

 

 

She wakes up crooked, legs tangled under her, book open, skewed on her lap, the sketch of her family next to her on the floor where it must have fluttered.

She picks it up, places it between the pages, and closes the book.

 _Better you die than I_ , she was accustomed to say. Whatever else happened, whatever else she might have wanted (sometimes), survival was always her imperative.

In this tomb, there’s nothing to survive, and no one to lie to, and she’s alone, a state she’s less acquainted with now than, possibly, ever in her time as a vampire, because, the last few months, he’s always been by her side.

Her reminiscence turns from her family to him, Mason Lockwood, as her imagination conjures the wolf from her dream, the _man_ in her bed in the hours before he died.

He was so pretty.

When she tracked him down on the Emerald Coast, she had a plan. She also had an expectation he would be like George Lockwood: egocentric, smug, deserving, really, of the fate she had in store.

He wasn’t.

He was sweet, kind, sexy, trying to be carefree and almost succeeding, despite the damage of his family. In the dormant, private places hidden in the cracks of her survival instinct, he unsettled her.

She watched him. Secreted herself in the back of bars where he drank a few beers, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with women he seemed to be equally friendly with before and after he took them back to his bed. He lived in what amounted to a shack on the beach. It kept him close to the ocean. He wasn’t the absolute best of the surfers, but he was, she thought, the most passionate. There seemed to be a kind of love affair between him, his board and the waves.

And she hesitated.

For a week that extended into two, then three, then more than was remotely prudent, until she came to her senses and charmed him, compelled his friend, enacted her plan.

Simple.

She needed a werewolf. Now she had one.

After all, better he die than her.

 

 

 

 

 

Snow, moonlight, teeth bared in a silver muzzle.

The wolf springs, she braces herself, but he doesn’t reach her, falls, yelping. She hears the ricochet of a bullet, slow-motion, silver (although everyone knows that’s a myth), sees the blast tear a hole in his chest.

He spasms, twitches out the last of his life, blood spewing in gushes, matting his shiny pelt, spilling red on the snow.

She kneels next to him.

 _Sorry about your pet wolf_ , Damon’s voice exhales, mocking, into the frost.

But the hand in the wolf’s chest, thrusting through fur and skin, shattering ribs, muscle, sinew, wrapped around his heart and soaked in blood is not Damon’s.

It’s hers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(It always was.)

She catches herself murmuring, “I’m sorry,” as she wakes.

 

 

 

 

 

The first time he turned, she was there for him, at least that was the game she played. She showed him how to chain himself up and, certain that he was secure, sat in the far corner of the basement of the remote, derelict house they chose, and watched.

She had never witnessed this before and she was fascinated, enthralled, by the process, by the knowledge that on the other side of the room was something lethal to her. It thrilled her, sent shivers down her spine, that she survived, still, close enough (almost) to touch her nemesis.

Of course, she comforted him. Said the expected words. They disappeared into his screams, until she stopped talking in clichés and really looked at him, looked into his eyes, into agony, defeat, unfathomable fear, and the shiver down her spine took on an entirely different quality, something very close to caring.

When the change came, through wracked sobs and pleas, to the menacing, rumbling quiet of the wolf, she crept towards him, the ghost of a movement, a ghost of affection, and only a little taint of irresistible childish daring to put her hand in the fire.

He roared, ferocious, lunged for her, fell back, checked, enraged, eyeing his prey for the next thwarted chance to attack.

A lump of penitence lodged in her throat, shot through with the surprising sense of missing him. The man who brushed her face with his hand, callused from surfing and gentle; who told her she was beautiful, that he loved her; who almost trusted the essential tie of him and her together.

“I love you,” her lips moved silently around the unplanned words.

When the sun rose, he laid his head in her lap, a demolished, exhausted human, and she said the words again, softly aloud this time.

“I love you too,” he said, hoarse and subdued, giving himself up to sleep. He meant it, with all of his misled heart.

For those few hours, she may have meant it too.

She doesn’t know. She wasn’t paying full attention, to him or to herself. She just knows his death was not supposed to occur before it suited her.

 

 

 

 

 

“I love you,” her voice rings out clear and firm in the frozen air, received by no one, nothing, emptiness.

 

 

 

 

 

Her eyelids flutter and she half-wakes gasping, the clarity of her dream-words shocking her, like a draught of ice-cold water, into panic.

But there’s no point in an exit strategy: she’s dreaming, in a tomb, and he’ll never hear her say it, at least not from her heart.

 

 

 

 

 

The wolf howls.

She stands her ground, saltwater on her lips, tears suspended on her eyelashes, shaking in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.

He’s there. He leaps.

“I love you,” she shouts, not to save herself (she’s almost weary of that), just to make sure he knows.

And suddenly there’s silence, stillness; not arid, frozen and bleak, but charged with life and pain and hope.

She’s upright, unhurt, and he’s sitting on the ground, inches from her feet, paws in front of him, looking up, eyes bright gold and, behind that, a flicker, a remembrance, of blue.

She reaches out a hand, lets her body follow it, buries her fingers in the warm fur, as she curls next to him in the snow.

“I love you,” she says, over and over, each repetition softer, muffled in silver-grey, longing, and the raw, tender peace of the unreal.

 

 

 

 

 

The taste of salt is still on her lips, the wet lashes, the sting of the cold against tears, the feel of his fur between her fingers, all of it recreated in the dark tomb.

All of it, except him.

She once said, idly, she lacked a werewolf. Now she understands the truth of her own words.

 

 


End file.
